Polish Holocaust victims gather to remember ancestors murdered by Nazis

Holocaust survivors and their families gathered at one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries on Sunday to remember more than 200,000 Jews from the city that were killed by the Nazis. The ceremony marked the 60th anniversary of the last transports from the Lodz ghetto to the Nazi death camps. 1,500 people stood in silent tribute as a Jewish cantor and a choir chanted Hebrew prayers in honor of those taken in cattle wagons to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Afterwards, survivors, city leaders and the Israeli minister for Science and Technology, Ilan Shalgi, placed flowers at a monument to the victims near the cemetery gate. They then moved to the railway station about a mile away, where some of Lodz's Jews began their final journey to the death camps. Three old wooden cattle cars still marked with the then name of the German railway, "Deutsche Reichsbahn", have been placed in the station as a memorial. Lodz, about 120 kilometers southwest of Warsaw, was once a thriving center of commerce, and the 230,000 Jews living in the city represented around a third of its population.